1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to images of specimens. In particular, the invention relates to management of specimen images.
2. Background of the Invention
An image of a biological specimen can be a useful tool in diagnosing a variety of pathological conditions. For instance, images of biological specimens can reveal cells in the process of dividing. Since cancer is characterized by rapidly dividing cells, an image showing an unusually large number of cells dividing can indicate the presence of cancerous cells.
Images of biological specimens are often stored in a digital form so they can be easily displayed for manipulation and study. For instance, displaying an image on a computer display device allows an operator to scroll to and/or zoom in on regions of interest.
In order for an image of a biological specimen to include information about the cells in the specimen, the image must be generated using a high degree of magnification. Due to this high degree of magnification, a typical imaging device is only able to display an image of a small region of the specimen. The image of this small region may not contain enough information to be useful to an observer. As a result, an image of a biological specimen is often created by piecing together images of adjacent regions of the specimen to form a larger image.
Computers displaying an image stored on a hard disk generally copy the image data from the disk drive into RAM before displaying the image. The computer then works from the image data copied into RAM when displaying the image. However, since images of biological specimens are often constructed from several smaller images, these images often require an amount of memory which exceeds the amount of available RAM or is otherwise not convenient to maintain completely in RAM. As a result, an image of a biological specimen can be difficult or even impossible to display. For the above reason, there is a need for methods of effectively managing the image data for biological images.